Katerina Zanos
Principal Machine Learning Engineer at The Walt Disney Company
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKaterina Zanos is a Principal Machine Learning Engineer with 12 years of experience building production recommender systems and ML platforms for media at scale. She currently leads recommendations at ESPN (The Walt Disney Company), owning retrieval, ranking, experimentation and responsible guardrails to deliver timely, relevant sports experiences. Previously she shaped Feed and Reels personalization at Meta and led personalization and newsroom platform initiatives at The New York Times, blending deep learning (two-tower networks, graph models) with pragmatic production engineering. Katerina holds dual Master’s degrees in Computer Science and Journalism from Columbia, giving her a distinctive view on content, distribution, and trust. She focuses on human-centric ML that optimizes long-term value rather than short-term engagement and mentors engineers to improve ownership and delivery quality. A background spanning newsroom tooling, social-media research projects, and robotics underscores her appetite for cross-disciplinary problems where ML meets real-world information flows.
12 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Professional Communications for Engineers Scientists and Managers Business/Corporate Communications, Professional Communications for Engineers Scientists and Managers Business/Corporate Communications at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyEngineer’s Degree Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineer’s Degree Electrical and Computer Engineering at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH)Master’s Degree Computer Science, Master’s Degree Computer Science at Columbia University
English, German, Greek, Spanish
Github Skills (23)
http-server8
pubsub7
google-app-engine7
kafka7
google-cloud6
cloud-storage6
appengine5
golang5
go5
gcp5
universe5
microservices4
api3
simulation3
classify3
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
MKLab-ITI/mklab-stream-manager
Oct 2013 - Jun 2014
Contributions:138 commits in 8 months
matzika/article-tagger-system
Jan 2016 - May 2016
Contributions:14 commits, 13 pushes, 1 branch in 3 months
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